Luk,” said Jakub, beside Felka. “This isn’t you. This isn’t you doing this. It’s this place. The forest is preying on our minds.”
Lukasz’s eyes flickered to the Unnaturalist. Ren let out a breath.
Then his eyes were back on hers. He looked insane. Sweat trickled down his forehead, lit in a dull shine on his throat, darkening with the shadow of a beard. The whole clearing tasted like panic. The coals sizzled in the silence, embers scattered across the black ground.
Ren noticed, with a terrible sickening twist, that his eyes seemed to have gone darker since the afternoon. Or was it her imagination? And what was more, under his collar, she could just make out the edge of a blistering cut—
Click.
Lukasz uncocked the rifle and lowered it. Everyone in the clearing let out a breath. Then he looked at Ren and lifted the book. It trembled in his shaking hand.
“Not everything in this forest belongs to you,” he said harshly. “Don’t forget it.”
Ren swallowed. She couldn’t speak.
She just nodded.
She waited until he had turned away, until everyone was breathing a little easier, until the coals were raked once more into the fire. She waited until no one was looking at her anymore. She waited until the agony in her hands had dulled to a steady throb.
And only then did she uncurl her hands and wait for the claws to recede, slipping back into her fingertips, leaving behind human palms, already running red with blood.
18
THAT NIGHT, LUKASZ DREAMED THAT he was lying on the ground by the fire, covered by his coat. He dreamed that he was not alone, that Ren was beside him, curled against his chest. He dreamed that the fire lit her hair in the most perfect golden glow, that she had never looked more like some glass-skinned, magic-eyed creature of myth. She had slept, in his dream. She had slept, and been beautiful and warm and real, and he had prayed for it to come true.
And then the cuts in his shoulder opened wide.
He felt them twisting, tearing. He felt the skin tear apart and the bones shatter. He screamed, but Ren was not there.
Through the haze of pain and horror came Jakub’s voice.
. . . multiply not by procreation, but by consumption . . .
Even as he writhed on the ground, he realized that the campsite was empty. He was totally alone. His blood poured over the ground, more blood than any human should have contained, enough blood to drown the fire in a hiss of steam.
When he looked down at his shoulder, the wounds yawned even wider. Sawtooth claws pushed out of the wound, pulling apart his skin, and the monster within struggled to be born.
Lukasz screamed.
. . . in the act of devouring a susceptible human . . .
And still, Jakub Rybak’s voice drowned him out.
. . . creates its progeny.
Micha? & Eliasz
FOUR YEARS EARLIER
“FINALLY,” SAID FRANCISZEK, CLOSING HIS book as Lukasz shut the door behind him. “Where have you been? It’s been hours—”
Lukasz pulled off his gloves.
“Killed a ?ywern under the king’s castle,” he said, grinning. He dropped the gloves on their room’s sideboard. “Would you believe how the last idiots tried to do the job? They left a sheep stuffed with sulfur outside its lair, and—”
He stopped dead.
The twins were sitting on straw pallets of their tavern room. Franciszek sat on the wide windowsill, twilight behind him, his book closed in his lap. Eryk, second-eldest of the remaining brothers, was painstakingly stitching a gash in Micha?’s skull. Eliasz held a bloody rag to his mouth.
Both glowered.
“Oh my God,” said Lukasz, unbuckling his sword. “Are you all right?”
Micha? turned toward him. A veiny, mottled bruise covered half his head. Eryk had shaved down the black hair over the wound and was now placing tiny, perfect stitches in Micha?’s scalp.
“No,” he said in a lisping voice. “We’re idioths.”
“Oh my God,” said Lukasz, this time much quieter.
It was winter. Outside the window, the buildings of Miasto stood out against the sky, in pink and yellow and blue. Snow covered their roofs, and more snow fell behind Franciszek. Their room had the cozy smell of woodsmoke from the fire burning in the hearth; it had the warm, rich smell of evergreens, draped along the mantelpiece and the available sills.
The sound of laughter and music drifted up through the floorboards, which were speckled with blood.
“Why?” asked Lukasz. “Why would you do something so stupid?”
“That’s how Skuba defeated the Wawel dragon,” said Franciszek from the windowsill. He folded his